Slashdot Mirror
eBay Chooses Debian for Wireless Servers
molo writes "According to Nils Lohner of the Debian press team, eBay and Workspot have chosen Debian with Apache and Perl for their wireless servers. Workspot also explains their reasons and their setup. "
I started noticing that major companies like Amazon.com and ebay started switching some of their servers to apache after microsoft released their pricing scheme for Win2k. I'm not sure if these large e-commerce sites really want to pay thousands of dollars in licensing for each server for the win2k upgrades. I'm sure they don't also want to pay that $1000+ license for having a "largish" web site per server. I think win2k will be the downfall of microsoft.
hi. this was not an official ebay announcement. word got out because we thanked the engineers at debian. which we do gratefully. we're a debian gnu/linux shop, who happen to work with ebay. the use of free software, the best stuff in our opinion, was OUR decision, not ebay's. cheers -- workspot
Guess what now it is. Kinda sorta:) I wish Drovak had his email address available to the public, oh well.
Ian
Hey now! I'm as Gnu/Linux'y as the next /.'er, but at least I'll have the guts to say that Sun makes a good product. The OS may be slower than some others, but it's solid, stable, and not buggy in the least. The hardware, with a few exceptions (Cough.. HME.. Cough..) is also quite good. As for the Sun scalability issue, it scales well. (I won't go so far to say it scales better than Linux, because I don't have my asbestos long-johns with me).
Do you have some sort of inherent grudge against Oracle? Oracle is slower than many other DB's, but it is by design. Oracle takes great lengths to make everything is pristine; it is one of the factors one considers when selecting a DB.
.sig: Now legally binding!
Geez, I've been wondering why eBay has had so many problems with keeping their systems up, and now I understand why. They shouldn't have to go with this proxy kind of architecture. If they had a well structured back end, which seperated presentation from the rest of the applicaiton, they'd write a new presentation layer which spoke directly to the back end, instead of having the overhead of their main servers generating the HTML and then the proxy server parsing it and generating new HTML.
sigs are a waste of space
--Cut to a smoke filled room....
We'll get the bid because our solution is quick-n-dirty. No software costs, just toss it out in Perl. We can just put in a good all nighter and get it working! We'll come in miles under those other bids for cost and schedule.
But a week down the road, eBay changes or adds a page and the damn thing breaks. They go to fix it, but it's all horribly obfuscated Perl and regexes. External consultants and internal programmers alike recoil in horror at it. Who can fix it? We can! We built the thing, afer all. We can charge ever higher maintenance fees as more and more users depend on our brittle piece of junk. The code will never be stable! Every change eBay makes will ripple down into our layer. Woo hoo!! Jackpot! A lifetime of suckling at the eBay teat!
a 'workspot', as we think of it, is a linux desktop you can use through a browser. it's server-side computing, including software rental, with a linux interface. store your stuff on it, run your applications on its vnc connection, serve up web sites. that's the idea. desktop.com, and a lot of similar things, have their own interfaces. "why not just use linux as is?" we asked ourselves. we hope to prod more people to port software to linux, and work on the ui generally, by offering a bigger market -- net surfers. we're just getting started here -- please be gentle.
I've seen several notes which mention Ebay's instability problems and the use of Solaris/Oracle on Ebay. There is no doubt the database servers are very critical, but it looks like the application logic itself runs on NT & IIS. I had my own share of frustration with Ebay services in the past, and I believe the database was not to blame. Look at this URL:
& item=555555555
http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem
(I made the item number up, but this is the correct form of URL to look up an item)
I know most server-side programming techniques allow aliases for server side apps/objects (i.e. I can write a Java servlet and call it "whateverISAPI.dll"), but the URL suggests that Ebay application logic is nothing but a bunch of ISAPI DLLs written for use with IIS. I would guess Ebay applications are written as ISAPI filters using MS Visual C++, and run on MS Windows NT servers running IIS. Or they have a really good reason to use another technology and call the program "ebayISAPI.dll".
Does anyone here know what Ebay runs on? Can anyone verify my guess, which I believe is pretty obvious to many Slashdotters.
Zigbee Central: A Zigbee weblog
For those who don't know and haven't visited, workspot gives you the standard "stash your filez here" interface, but...there's this intriguing little tab up top labeled "Linux Desktop." You click on it, and are asked for the screen geometrics you want to use. A quick click later, and you're looking at a KDE desktop! Through the magic of AT&T's VNC Java viewer, you get your very own KDE session, where you can do whatever you'd normally do on a "regular" Linux box and account.
This is very neat, and I think I'll kill another hour playing with it.
--------------------
Nice to see free software, once again, as part of the back-end middleware solution, but how about supporting wireless *clients* using Linux?
;)
There is a driver for Mobitex modems(*) that gives you datalink through network layer capabilities; so we at least have the hardware support.
---
* written by guess who.